Albert Camus

First lines

On September 22, 1913, on the Saint-Paul Farm outside the town of Mondovi in Algeria, Lucien Auguste Camus wrote to his employer, "The grape harvest at Saint-Paul ended this morning at 10 a.m."

About this book

In this enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of Albert Camus, the French writer and journalist Olivier Todd has drawn on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts -- between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus -- his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism, and his attraction to the theater and to journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's …

Themes & subjects

About the author

Olivier Todd

1929 – 2024

Olivier Todd (1929-2024) était un journaliste, correspondant de guerre, romancier et biographe français. Il est reconnu pour avoir écrit des biographies définitives et intimistes de figures clés de la culture du XXe siècle, telles qu'Albert Camus, André Malraux et Jacques Brel. Il est décédé à l'âge de 95 ans. --- Olivier Todd (1929-2024) was a French journalist, war correspondent, novelist, and biographer. He is renowned for writing definitive and intimate biographies of key figures in 20th-century culture, such as Albert Camus, André Malraux, and Jacques Brel. He died at the age of 95.